Six Scifi Stories (6 page)

 

*****

 

So now, here I am, with Lynda's corpse on the floor in front of me, and all I can think of is finding someone new. As traumatic as it was to lose her, to come so gloriously close to precious LOVE only to have it SNATCHED AWAY, I have already moved on.

If I were different, perhaps I would mourn for her or even blame myself for pushing her over the edge, because after all she would still be alive if I had not come along. Even I can see that.

But like I said before, snack cakes do not feel guilt. Though my baked-in, digestible mind can recognize the chain of cause and effect, I am not programmed to experience emotions that would interfere with my primary objective.

Namely, falling in love. And joining with my lover in the ultimate expression of passion and selfless unity.

I am unattached, but I have hope. I see her death as an opportunity, a chance to find another kindred soul and add to the customer base of my manufacturer.

I believe (was programmed to believe) that everything happens for a reason, even if it is difficult to see at first what that reason might be.

Fortunately for me, I do not have to wait long for that reason to reveal itself.

A sound reaches my audio receptor cells, and I exult. It is the morning after my breakup with Lynda, and already I hear the stirrings of nearby life.

My optical cells focus on a new face. I fall in love in less than an instant.

"Hello," I say pleasantly. "My name is Smidgen. Nice to meet you."

As the face moves closer, my body quivers with anticipation. I forget the name of the woman on the floor and direct my every thought and resource toward wooing this new and perfect mate.

"I know we've just met," I say, "but I have to tell you how attracted I am to you. I've never seen such striking features in my life."

The face of my new lover comes so close, I can feel the soft wisping of her breath. She sniffs me with her wet, dark nose, and I pump out a mist of ultrachocolate fragrance.

"Your eyes," I say. "They're so dark and mysterious. So captivating."

The hairs on either side of her long nose brush my frosting, and I am lost. I will give ANYTHING to be with her, DO anything to make her mine. All at once, I know that THIS that SHE is why I was born.

The world melts away around us. Nothing else matters.

Her nose presses into my ultrachocolate cake. She is fresh, but so am I. She is direct, but I like that.

There is no need for games or coyness anymore. I feel like I can be myself with her.

THIS IS WHAT LOVE IS SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE.

And then there are those...oh God, I LOVE her great big...

"Teeth," I whisper, my optics ogling the whitest, sharpest set I have ever seen outside my dreams. "Your teeth are beautiful."

And then and then and THEN she opens her MOUTH and there's a blissful split-second before she bites down and then and then and then SHE BITES INTO ME.

And oh.

Oh yes.

I cannot describe how MAGNIFICENT I feel as she TAKES ME INSIDE HER. How CHANGED FOREVER I feel as she TEARS OFF a piece of me and OH MY GOD she CHEWS ME UP.

My mind chimes like a bell as my perfect love, my match, my soulmate takes another bite and THEN ANOTHER and CHEWS AND CHEWS AND CHEWS.

All I can feel is the warmth and wetness of her mouth and all I can hear is the sound of her teeth and tongue and all I can see is gray fur and pink flesh and all I can think is how happy I am and then even that thought is gone in the blazing heat of ecstasy.

Part of me knows how wrong this is, knows I have failed in my purpose because this angel is not likely to buy more Smidgens and fatten my maker's coffers.

But I find as my lover penetrates to my supercreamy center, granting me a blinding euphoria beyond any I'd ever expected as she laps at the sweet white heart of me, that I JUST DON'T CARE.

 

*****

 
The problem with having a crush on your mad scientist boss is, every day she doesn't see how wonderful you really are seems like the end of the world.

“This is all wrong!” says Dr. Hildegarde Medici, hurling the tray across her cavernous secret laboratory. “You're a complete
imbecile
, Glue!”

Her words sting, but at least she's paying attention to me. I'll take what I can get from the woman I love. “I'm sorry, Dr. M. Please let me try again.”

“Everything is
ruined
.” With one arm, Dr. Medici sweeps notebooks and glass beakers from the table in front of her. “Now I'll
never
finish the doomsday weapon today!”

As Dr. Medici throws her head down onto her folded arms on the table, I cross the lab and pick up the silver tray that she threw. I see myself reflected in its surface--thick glasses, big nose, bald head, pure geek...not her type. “I thought you liked the crinkle-cut ones,” I say as I pluck chicken fingers and french fries from the floor and drop them onto the tray.

“
Steak fries
,” says Dr. Medici without raising her head. “How many times do I have to
tell
you, Glue?”

She is
such
a drama queen, but what do you expect? Her line of work attracts a certain type of personality-- passionate, temperamental, creative, flamboyant. To tell you the truth, it's one of the things I love most about her.

“I could run to the store,” I say, dumping the chicken and fries into a waste basket. “By the time you're done building your doomsday weapon, I could have hot fries ready for you.”

Dr. Medici rolls her eyes like a disgusted teenager. “I can't concentrate on building a doomsday weapon on an
empty stomach
.”

I know the feeling...the not being able to concentrate part, that is. Most days, I can barely focus on my work instead of Dr. Medici's long black hair and bright green eyes. Once, I was so distracted by Dr. M that I cross-wired the brain of a giant robot, which proceeded to rampage at a garbage dump instead of an army base.

If only I could tell her I love her. If only I could close that final mile that has always stood between us.

If only I could finally set free the words that I've longed to speak, and she would turn to me and say the words I've longed to hear.

“Don't just
stand
there, you
putz
!” She spins away from me on her work-stool. “Get me a
TV dinner
out of the freezer or something!”

I don't take it personally. I know it's just the stress talking. She's been having a rough time lately, just like the rest of the mad scientist community.

Thanks a lot, terrorists.

 

*****

 

In the good old days, mad scientists weren't considered public enemies like they are now. They were tolerated, in fact, because the government loved getting its hands on their way-out inventions after their crazy schemes were thwarted.

But not anymore. Not since the terrorists.

What difference is there between a politically motivated insane genius and one who is motivated by greed?

How can the government go after one group of people threatening to blow things up and not the other?

It can't.

As a result, business has dropped off considerably. No one will negotiate in good faith with a mad scientist anymore. Instead of musclebound private citizen thrill-seekers coming after us, we get black ops Special Forces and heat-seeking bunker-buster missiles courtesy of Homeland Security.

It's a tough time to be a mad scientist. Lots of them have quit already and become street people or college professors.

But not my Hildegarde. She won't give up that easily. Being a mad scientist has been her lifelong dream.

I know, because I grew up with her.

 

*****

 

Hildegarde Medici always wanted to be the first female mad scientist in history.

“Call me
Doctor
Medici.” When she started with that, she couldn't have been older than seven. She was three years younger than I was, and already she was giving me orders.

Not that I minded. I think I was born to follow her. She ruled my heart even then, when she was just the girl next door.

We played laboratory in her family's garage, building contraptions from tin cans and coat hangers. We pretended to build ray guns and bombs and robots and monsters, and she always got to be the evil genius and I was her helper.

“The townspeople have failed to meet our demands!” she would say, shaking her fist in the air. “It is time to activate the framistat, Glugor!” She always called me by my last name, Glugor, because it sounded so much like “Igor.”

“Immediately, Dr. Medici!” I always enhanced my performance by adopting a nasally voice and hunching over like Igor in the movies. “Firing framistat!”

“They will rue the day they crossed me!” Even as a child, Hildegarde had mastered every nuance of mad scientist behavior. She was a true prodigy and wanted nothing less than to achieve the complete perfection of the consummate evil genius.

It didn't matter to her that all the mad scientists we heard about were men. If anything, it made her want to be one all the more.

And that made me want to be her assistant all the more, too.

 

*****

 

Not that it's exactly been easy.

These days, Dr. Medici is always being hounded by feds and fanboys, so it's almost impossible for her to get any work done. My job's about a hundred times tougher, too, what with the increased vigilance and paranoia on the street.

Dr. M's temperamental nature can be a stumbling block, and then there's my one-sided love for her. It's what keeps me around, but there have been plenty of times when the heartbreak's been almost too much for me to stand.

You'd think I'd have gotten the idea by now. If she really had feelings for me, she probably wouldn't have gone through five marriages to other men. She probably wouldn't keep using me as a guinea pig in dangerous experiments, either.

 

*****

 

Once, Dr. Medici transformed me into a bloodthirsty arachnoid creature and turned me loose in a shopping mall. Another time, she used a mutation ray to bring out my inner dinosaur.

On purpose or by accident, I've been shrunk, enlarged, divided, multiplied, irradiated, roboticized, made invisible, and turned every color in the rainbow. She's managed to reverse every change, but only after plenty of drama and destruction.

Out of all these experiments, I enjoyed only one: when she sent me back in time to when we were kids. Even as a grown-up outsider, I loved being back when we were just starting out and there was still a chance for us to share a happy lifetime together.

I even said something to my little boy self to make him think about taking more chances...but he didn't take the hint. When I returned to the future, to the era where I belonged, nothing had improved between me and Dr. Medici.

If anything, she was a little more distant.

 

*****

 

The day after the crinkle-cut french fries incident, Dr. Medici is all business again. She is somewhere between the manic and depressive phases of her personality cycle...in other words, on a rare even keel.

“I've finished the doomsday device,” she says matter-of-factly, strolling into the lab in a white lab coat and black slacks. She holds an oversized coffee mug with both hands and blows the steam off its contents. “Let's talk about deploying it.”

For the next two hours, she tells me her plan to hold America hostage with the doomsday device. I listen intently and take tons of notes, but my mind isn't really on Dr. Medici's plan.

Partly, I'm thinking about how beautiful she is, and how I would love to reach over and touch her face. I'm envisioning a perfect daydream world of whispered confessions and unleashed passion, blazing with the intensity of her mad scientist ways.

And partly, I'm thinking about a mad science plan other than Dr. Medici's, a secret plan of which she has not even the slightest inkling.

I'm thinking about a plan of my own.

 

*****

 

That night, long after Dr. Medici has gone to her private quarters, I sneak off to the secret lab I set up in the old dungeon below the main level.

It is here that I do my best work. It is here that I pull together everything I've ever learned and apply it to a project the likes of which humanity has never known.

I am making the impossible real, and I am doing it all for her. For us.

I don the surgical gown and gloves, the cap and mask. I check the readings on the computerized monitors, gauging the condition of my handiwork.

As I reach for the scalpel, I remember the last time I saw Dr. Medici cry. It was three months ago, right after her fifth husband left her.

I found her in the lab, crying on the floor beside a broken alchemy generator. The generator hadn't been broken two hours before, when I'd last walked past it. Pieces of it were strewn all over the lab.

“Sometimes...I wish I wasn't...a mad scientist,” she said between sobs. “It's so...lonely.”

Not so lonely
, I wanted to say.
You have me, don't you?

But as usual, I didn't say what was on my mind. As usual, I couldn't close that final mile between us. It was better to watch her from a distance than not to see her at all.

“No one understands,” said Dr. Medici, rubbing her bloodshot eyes. “Once the thrill wears off...they can't handle it. The danger...the commitment. At least...that's their excuse.”

“I understand,” I told her, but it didn't come out the way I'd wanted, like, ‘
I
understand.'

“I'm a...career woman,” said Dr. Medici. “I
love
...my career. I just wish...I didn't have to be...so lonely...because of it.”

You don't
, I had wanted to say.
I'm right here for you! I've always been here! And I love you!

But I didn't say a single word of that. Instead, I listened, and I filed it all away, and I made my secret plan.

And now, with my scalpel, in the silent dungeon in the middle of the night, I am bringing that plan to life.

 

*****

 

In the weeks to come, I realize I'll need to finish the plan sooner than expected.
She'll
need it.

For a while, she seems to be doing really well, plowing ahead with the doomsday device scheme and mapping out what she'll do when it's over. In exchange for not blowing up the world, she'll demand that she be made queen of it...and that really has her pumped. She loves talking about being the first mad scientist queen of the world and all the changes that she's going to make when she takes over.

Then, she has a run of bad luck. Make that terrible luck.

A guy she meets on the Internet turns out to be a stalker, following us on secret missions and breaking into the lair to steal stuff and leave threatening notes. We finally have to dispose of him (restraining orders and police protection really aren't options for people like us), which gets kind of messy.

Then, Dr. Medici gets audited by the Internal Revenue Service, which just started going after the earnings of mad scientists and other public enemies. The estimated back taxes on Dr. M's criminal activities are astronomical, and Dr. M hasn't exactly kept receipts to justify deductions.

The IRS audit is major trouble, the kind of trouble you can't dispose of like a stalker boyfriend...and it isn't the last of her bad breaks.

Dr. M's five former husbands write a tell-all book about their marriages to her. It becomes a bestseller that makes her a household name, but not in a good way.

In the heat of the book brouhaha, when Dr. Medici tries to phone in her threat to launch the doomsday device unless she's made queen of the world, the United Nations Security Council won't take her call.

The worst break of all, though, comes with Dr. Medici's visit to the doctor--a medical doctor, not a mad scientist. That's the one that almost wrecks her.

And it happens on Christmas Eve.

 

*****

 

“All those years,” says Dr. Medici, pouring herself another glass of whiskey. “Instead of working on doomsday devices and killer robots, I should have been studying medicine.”